PUT NAMIBIA’S BABY SEAL SLAUGHTER OUT OF BUSINESS

When Namibia gained independence in 1990, it issued rights and quotas to two
sealing concession holders to club 930,000 seals. Since then, harvesters
have filled just 60% of their annual quota, causing the government to lose
the 40% revenue gleaned from each dead pup… Namibia’s sealing trade has
rights until 2019 to kill a million seals.

This year’s Cape Fur Seal slaughter was to begin 7/1/09, but then
temporarily suspended to negotiate the possible $14 million sellout of
Namibia’s seal trade to Francois Hugo of Seal Alert-South Africa.

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Brutalized seals are so young, mother’s milk gushes from their knife wounds.
Utter terror may cause pups to regurgitate milk even before they are
clubbed. After several blows with a wooden club, pups presumed dead are
“bled out” with a knife. Some remain conscious till partially skinned.

I respectfully ask you to boycott Cape Fur Seal pelts and thereby thwart the
only hunt that permits clubbing of nursing pups. Seal fur jackets and
medicinal oils are ethically indefensible. I am confident a businessman with
your acumen can tap other lucrative resources that don’t invest in this
bloody trade.

The sealskin market is shriveling amid an economic slump and passage of a
European Union ban on all non-aboriginal seal goods. Belgium, the
Netherlands, Slovenia, Croatia, South Africa, the U.S. and Mexico already
prohibit seal products. Cape fur seal imports were specifically banned
across the EU in 2009. Yavuz Group, an exclusive buyer of baby pelts in
2008, seems to be the primary incentive for an otherwise dead-end industry.

Namibia’s seal population has endured massive depletion due to starvation.
Thus, claims from the Ministry of Fisheries that bludgeoning and slashing
nursing pups is crucial to population control ring false. The cull itself
excludes breeding seals. Moreover, natural cycles within ecosystems level
populations. South Africa, for example, has observed no rise in seal numbers
since ending its commercial cull in 1990.

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